/m/obit

Reader Comments and Retorts

Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.

I said this elsewhere on the internet, but baseball doesn't get a whole lot more colorful or interesting than Fregosi's '93 Phillies. It's amazing that he was able to control a clubhouse with Daulton, Kruk, Dykstra, Incaviglia, Hollins, and Mitch Williams, and it's mindblowing that he won a pennant with that many...unique individuals.

The '93 Phillies had such a crazy group of players that Larry Andersen was just another guy.

RIP. He was on a Cooperstownish shortstop career path through 1970, his age 28 season. Then he cratered and was a marginally useful part time 3B and 1B after that. Wikipedia says he had a tumor in his foot discovered in 1971. Anyone have the further story on why he fell off so definitively? Did he just injure out of the SS position?

I always thought of Fregosi as the kind of player who was underappreciated in his time until more advanced analysis recognized how valuable he was, especially as a hitter. But he was highly regarded throughout the 1960s: He got MVP votes in each of his first eight full seasons.

fregosi didn't take care of himself (by his own admission) got out of shape and it's not easy to recover as an athlete once you let things slip. the combination of gaining weight, possibly a bit too much of it alcohol related and moving to a new league to a tough hitters park and being over 30 was too much to overcome.

1971 was injury related. 1972 and 1973 was what I describe above. I think he cut back on the drinking after the 1972 season but the combination of everything else worked against.

you see that with athletes every so often where just one thing slips and instead of getting it back the whole mechanism falls apart.

The '95 Phils started out just as dominantly as the '93 squad -- on June 27th they were 37-18 before a slew of injuries sent them reeling. Only three regulars had more than 500 PA, only one starter had more than 162 IP.

Hopefully he's up there chatting with my dad. Sat in his Angels season seats on the first base side for game four of the 1986 ALCS, which is to this day is the most memorable sporting event I've ever attended. Really nice person.

Not sure if Jayson Stark has written about this yet, but one of the all-time great TV sporting moments as a kid was seeing "The Trial of Jim Fregosi" on the Great Sports Debate on Prism in Philly. Local Philly radio guys Angelo Cataldo and Glenn Macnow were the attorneys, Al Morganti was the judge and, believe it or not, Stark played Fregosi. He wore a pillow under his jacket and had 5 cigarettes in his mouth.

This was before the 93 team, and basically they all were roasting Fregosi for burning out his pitchers. The whole Mitch/Roger Mason thing notwithstanding, he'll always be remembered fondly in Philly.

I caught a few minutes of him speaking at the All Star Fan Fest when the All Star Game was in Los Angeles of Anaheim a few years back. Nothing uniquely revelatory, but it was still cool to see the original Halo Legend. Not only was he the first star (at least as a position player), he also managed the team to their first division championship.

In Primer lore, once upon a time the Chicago-based Angel fan contingent (who chimed in above) was labeled as part of the Fregosi famiglia.

1) Jim Fregosi ranks at, actually just a bit over, the entry level for the Hall of Fame by the New Historical Abstract. That version of Win Shares is now elderly, but I just wanted to make sure - has your WAR dropped his ranking out of that range and solidly into the Hall of Very Good? If so, do you know where you and Bill James 2000 disagree?

2) Much more complex question. Someone recently commented (maybe even actually you) that your version of WAR starts top-down, like Win Shares, rather than building up by the player and then checking standard deviations against team Run Scored and Runs Allowed by team/season. One reason that I ask this is that I'm not at all certain how to use WAR in this way. The second is that the difference in approaches does, in and of itself, force differences between systems that work top-down and those that work player up.

What happens is that the two approaches treat Luck differently as a result of dealing with what I call "undiscovered value." Here's how it goes (AROM very likely knows all this): In a traditional WAR system, the formulas used to rank players generate player WAR, you sum them up to test different versions of WAR, and your testing standard is how close to matching actual team/seasons your system gets. The difference between your system (or anyone else's) and actual team RS/season is what I call "undiscovered value." Some of it, of course, is skill that we haven't managed to tease out the data yet. And some of undiscovered value is Luck. Previous WAR systems, by their very nature, treat undiscovered value as though it were all Luck. When you've got as close a method as you can get to team RS/season, you stop. And you use the numbers your system gives you, ignoring that pesky undiscovered value because, well, it's just luck. This is, of course, wrong in nitpicky terms. Some of undiscovered value is skill and some is Luck. To assume that it's all Luck is wrong.

When Win Shares the book came out, I looked deeply at the approach, and found that starting team-down makes a huge difference. In Win Shares, if your Win Shares team/season differs from the actual team's season, you force your system to assign all the undiscovered value to individual players. This, essentially, amounts to treating undiscovered value as if all of it were skill, and there was no such thing as Luck. So, WS and WAR have never gotten the same results. If you've developed a top-down WAR system, that is very new (to me) and will change your assignment of undiscovered value, forcing it to be treated as if it were all skill and no luck. So, what I really want to know is how your system treats undiscovered value and luck. I've thought for years that this was the biggest source of disconnect between the two systems. If that's no longer true, it's important at least to me. So, can you answer all this in the short space of a comment? - Thanks in advance, Brock Hanke

#22 The system used in the new HA is closer to extended prime than pure career. See the comment on Puckett for some notion of design philosophy. I get Fregosi at #17 for best 5 years. (James also looks at best 3 consecutive years.) and higher by my definition of prime.